eBay Completes Acquisition of Corrigon Ltd.

UPDATE: eBay has completed the acquisition of Corrigon Ltd., a pioneer of visual search technologies. Corrigon’s image recognition technology will enhance the eBay shopping experience. The Corrigon team has joined eBay’s structured data organization and will be based in eBay’s Israeli Development Center in Netanya.

The below posting was originally published on October 5, 2016:

eBay has signed an agreement to acquire Corrigon Ltd., a pioneer of visual search technologies. Corrigon helps identify objects within an image, matching both visual and textual elements to ensure that the image is recognized, correctly classified and best-matched to its corresponding product. With more than one billion live listings on eBay’s platform, Corrigon's expertise and technology will help match the best images to their products so that shoppers can be confident that what they buy is exactly what they see. Corrigon is the third acquisition in 2016 to further bolster eBay’s structured data efforts, following the acquisitions of SalesPredict and Expertmaker. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Corrigon brings deep experience in image processing and computer vision to eBay. Specifically, Corrigon's technology and expertise will contribute to eBay’s efforts with image recognition, classification and image enhancements as part of its structured data initiative. There are three parts to eBay’s structured data initiative: first, collect the data; second, process and enrich the data; and third, create product experiences. Corrigon will support the second and third parts – processing and enriching the data and creating product experiences.

“As we continue to evolve the eBay shopping experience, Corrigon's technology and expertise will help buyers find the best results when shopping on eBay through experiences that were not possible a year ago, before our investments in structured data,” said Amit Menipaz, Vice President and General Manager of Structured Data at eBay. “Corrigon represents eBay’s third acquisition in the structured data space this year, further underscoring our commitment to powering deeper inventory insights for our sellers and compelling new user experiences for our buyers.”

"Corrigon's state-of-the art visual search technology enables fine grained product detection within images. We look forward to applying our expertise and technology to eBay's platform, which has more than a billion product images," said Avinoam Omer, co-founder and CEO of Corrigon. "Working in partnership with eBay’s structured data team, we will help eBay sellers list more efficiently and eBay buyers find what they are looking for faster in order to increase customer sales conversions.”

Upon the close of the transaction, the Corrigon team will join eBay’s structured data organization and will be based in eBay’s Israeli Development Center in Netanya.

Corrigon was co-founded in 2008 by Avinoam Omer and Einav Itamar. Prior to Corrigon, Omer founded Zoomix (acquired by Microsoft), which developed machine learning technology for data quality and master data management and, before that, DataChase.